Examining the Liaison between Marketing Communication and Open Innovation, in the Scope of the Hungarian Innovation Clusters

In the last decade, a new phenomena has appeared in the scope of innovation, deriving from the exaggerated perception of the forming and optimizing effects of the community groups coming exist outside of the company which have an essential role to boost up its competitiveness in the future. Thus many companies have realized that sharing their innovations infers better position in the market. It indeed contributed to the widespread of this concept. Nonetheless this phenomena ? non episodically ? brings additional advantages for the company, such as exploitation of the own market with enhanced research capacity or building in originally not existed ideas to the current capital (Chesbrough, 2003). On the other hand, open innovation can be described as the flow of direct exploitation of knowledge for the sake of accelerating internal innovation along with expanding markets to its external applicability. On the market this philosophy appeared firstly with the open source software’s (West and Gallagher, 2004). In this manner, open innovation is a paradigm that assumes internal and external ideas are inseparably applied together when a company tends to develop technology, toolkit and communication. This business model is about to utilize even internally and externally created ideas to create values, simultaneously indicates internal movements to exploit a certain (created) value. As a result, open innovation brings significant advantages to the companies which become capable to obtain intellectual power from outside their boundaries (Gassmann, Enkel and Chesbrough, 2010). In Hungary, the idea of open innovation is widely supported by the innovation clusters (currently 23 are operating in Hungary). The target population of my research was made up of the accredited innovation clusters. The duration of data registration took place between July 2011 and May 2013, during which period a total of 21 innovation clusters earned the title accredited cluster. In my assessment I managed to contact 18 accredited innovation clusters, which is 85.71% of the entire target population (access rate). The result and practical significance of my study shows that innovation clusters are relevant organisational forms during the examination of open innovation. Because from networks they secure wider platform for cooperation; help the integrity of knowledge through collective projects and create trustful atmoshpere between the members using different communication technologies and practices.